When you hear the word blast, what comes to your mind?
An explosion or maybe a blow of sand storm?
Email blast closely resembles this picture as it means sending email to your entire email list all at once. Most of the time, marketers may send email campaigns to their entire list without any strategy.
Result? More bounces that will hurt domain reputation.
But you can get desired results by strategically planning email blasts. We will discuss that in this guide.
Table of contents
- What is an email blast?
- Email blasts best practices
- How to send an email blast effectively?
- Way forward
What is an email blast?
Email blast is the practice of sending a single email to a large audience all at once. Email blasts are also known as broadcast emails, mass emails, bulk emails, e-blasts as they cover a wider audience simultaneously.
Many email marketers used this approach to send email campaigns to more subscribers, hoping to get better results through more inboxes. Unfortunately, this approach had many loopholes; one of them was that these emails weren't user-centric.
If you send irrelevant emails to your subscribers, what’s the use, right?
So, we will discuss best practices that you must follow when sending email blasts to achieve your email marketing objectives and keep your subscribers happy and engaged.
Email blasts best practices
Email marketers may not have considered the major email best practices while sending out bulk emails which are as follows:
• Email list segmentation
Every user is different in their behavior, demography, preferences, and many other ways. That’s why segmenting your mailing list is vital to get your message to target subscribers.
• Sending personalized and targeted emails
Personalized emails are the secret weapon to get more engagement by sending more targeted emails. But, earlier, marketers may not have included it in their email marketing strategy.
• Making emails accessible for all
Email accessibility is an emerging trend in email marketing, and marketers are making their emails much more accessible for users with human disabilities or technical limitations like visual impairments, image rendering issues, etc. But, before such awareness, marketers might have sent out emails not accessible to every user resulting in low results.
To know more about accessibility check out a11project.
• Responsive emails for different devices and screen sizes.
Without a thorough understanding of your email subscribers’ device usage, you might end up sending emails that don’t render well across different devices. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what might happen when responsive email design was not prevalent in email marketing.
Check out Litmus's email client share to know about device usage by your subscribers.
But, with the awareness and adoption of these best practices, you can save time and resources and yield better results through effective email marketing blasts. But how do you do that? That’s what we will discuss next.
How to send an email blast effectively?
Here is a step by step breakdown of sending an email blast for enhanced performance:
1. Define your goals
The foremost thing to do is define what you want to achieve through sending bulk emails.
Do you want to increase signup by a certain number? Do you want to increase demo booking by 15%?
It can be anything, but it should be achievable, measurable, and practical. If you aren’t clear about your goals, sending an email blast will serve no purpose.
2. Choose a reliable email service provider (ESP)
Sending a strategic email blast can be a hassle, so it is a wise decision to choose a reliable ESP. It can help you build and manage your email list, monitor your IP and domain reputation, analyze the email performance, track users’ data, etc. and offer you insights on where you can improve.
There are many ESPs in the market that offer you various services. But, if you want to get higher conversions on your email blasts, you should check out the AMP email by Mailmodo.
3. Create and segment your email list
If you send email blast to a purchased email list will mean one thing only - high bounce, low email deliverability, and a bad reputation. To avoid that, we recommend you build up a clean email list built with users’ permission.
To know more, you can read our guide on How to build an email list from scratch.
After you have a clean mailing list, you should segment it. Email list segmentation is a great strategy to target a specific segment based on users’ demography, behaviors, geography, etc.
4. Create your emails
It’s time to delve into the most important task - creating and designing the email. Here are a few tips that we recommend:
Write a compelling, relevant, and engaging subject line. Do not try to lure users by writing clickbait subject lines like GRAB YOUR COPY NOW!!! It will only trigger the spam filters.
Make your emails accessible so that everyone can read and understand them.
Don’t forget to make your emails responsive for different devices, OS, and browsers.
Add alt text if you add images or GIFs in the images.
Must include a clear and compelling call to action.
You can also read our guide on email design best practices to create valuable and relevant mass email campaigns to generate higher conversions.
Way forward
Email blasts may have a bad reputation, but you have the solution to make them more effective.
But, your work doesn’t stop after you press the send button.
How would you ensure that all the time, effort, and resources you put into creating a strategic email blast have generated results?
Yes, with email analytics.
You must track and track the email marketing metrics and use that data to develop helpful insights. You can then use these insights to analyze your progress and improve future email blasts.
